In the last five years or so, I’ve been involved in the enhancement, support, or creation of a number of CMSs. I’ve seen firsthand both the thought-process that went into the design of the CMS and the effort required to build the CMS that includes all the features proposed by the design. Some features tend to make more sense than others.
Probably the most popular feature of current CMSs is the built-in HTML editor, something that allows your basic non-tech savvy user to get WYSIWIG with their website. There are two flaws in the inclusion of a built in HTML editor, especially a WYSIWIG editor.
First, websites fall into two basic categories: those that matter, and those that don’t. If your website matters, you should not be leaving its creation and maintenance in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. And if your web dev/admin does know what she’s doing, the last thing she’s going to want is a clumsy, feature-starved HTML editor when she could just write the HTML by hand for far better results. If your website doesn’t matter, there’s no reason to bother with a CMS. Find some contractor to build your three pages and you’re good.
Second, built-in HTML editors are notoriously bad at showing you what your website will look like in the browsers that your visitors are going to actually use. There’s not much point in spending hours tweaking your pages to look right in your CMS’s editor just to discover that they only work in IE, and look like garbage in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
CMSs are often advertised as one-size-fits-all systems. This is next on my list of flawed design features. As I mentioned earlier, there are websites that matter, and those that don’t. If yours is one of those that matters, it is inevitable that you will want your website to do stuff that isn’t the same as every other website out there. No matter how many features that come with the CMS, you aren’t going to be happy with it if the CMS doesn’t support easily doing what you want. And trying to add a new feature to your one-size-fits-all CMS? Ha ha. Fat chance.
The fancier CMSs allow you do cool stuff like manage the structure of your website and upload templates. They take all this info that you give them and build you the pages for your site. That’s great and all, but it also brings us to the next flaw in CMS design. Where is your content stored?
Storing content in actual web page files, even ones that were created so fancily with smart templates and XSLT, brings with it unnecessary baggage. Most websites that matter are none too small, and that kind of content storage can result in the creation and storage of a vast number of files. All of those files will be discarded or re-created every time you make any changes to your templates (and possibly your site structure), giving you lots of time to play Solitaire while you wait for your change to be applied. It’s also no fun to move all those files around, and they are generally far too married to your web site’s design.
Content should be stored separately, preferably in a database. Pages can then be created dynamically (or “on-the-fly” for you buzzword junkies). Changes to templates don’t have any direct effect on an files other than the template, and of course the dynamically created pages don’t need to be stored or transferred. Most importantly, the content is agnostic, knowing nothing about the web site’s design. This makes your content highly portable. If you completely redo the look and feel of your website, the core content is unaffected, rather than requiring hours of painful page by page updates.
The most fundamental flaw in common CMSs is a lack of true versioning. CMSs are treated more like portals to a website, instead of a true management system. There needs to be at the minimum two basic versioning options: the ability to preview and then publish changes, rather than having them go live as soon as they’re saved, and the ability to roll back all changes to any past version of the web site. It’s easy to make mistakes when updating a web site’s content. Having a way to undo those mistakes easily can save lots of hours.
For people and businesses whose web sites matter, the best CMS is most likely to be a custom tailored CMS that will fit your needs exactly. Any CMS is going to have a similar set of basic features, and involvement in its customization will guarantee that additional features you will need are made available and has the added benefit of forcing you to review your website to determine what those needs will be. As long as your custom CMS allows you to freely edit content without having to use a clumsy built in HTML editor, includes all the features and options you need, and stores the content intelligently, you’re bound to be happy with the result.